The PBE has been updated! As we continue the 7.21 PBE cycle, today's patch includes a new summoner icon and emote duo, skin tweaks, continued rune testing, & more!

Continue reading for more information!

(Warning: PBE Content is tentative and subject to change - what you see below may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers at the end of the cycle! Manage your expectations accordingly.)

Table of Contents

New Summoner Icon and Emote

A new summoner icon and matching emote are now on the PBE. Inferring from the file name (GL_Emotes_China_Masters_League.png) this looks to be a regional icon for a server in China for Diamond 1, Master, and Challenger players. No further details are available.

Skin Tweaks

As mentioned by KateyKhaos a few changes were made to the Death Sworn skins:

Continued Runes Reforged Testing & Changes

Rune Reforged, the new combination of runes and masteries into one new system, continues testing on the PBE this cycle - including runes themselves, the runes panel, the client run inventory and editing UI, base stat and jungle tuning, & more.

10/11 Changelist

Precision

The Brazen Perfect [P/S set bonus]
Attack speed increased from 14% to 18%

The Merciless Elite [P/D set bonus]
Attack speed increased from 14% to 18%

The Eternal Champion [P/R set bonus]
Attack speed increased from 14% to 18%

The Savant [P/I set bonus]
Attack speed increased from 14% to 18%

Sorcery

The Calamity [S/D set bonus]
AP increased from 15 to 25
AD increased from 10.5 to 15

The Cryptic [S/I set bonus]
AP increased from 15 to 25
AD increased from 10 to 15

The Incontestible Spellslinger [S/P set bonus]
AP increased from 15 to 25
AD increased from 10 to 15

The Ancient One [S/R set bonus]
AP increased from 15 to 25
AD increased from 10 to 15

Summon Aery
Damage increased from 10 + 40 based on level to 20 - 60 based on level
Shield lowered from 40 -100 based on level to 30 - 80 based on level

Arcane Comet
[New Effect] "While Arcane Comet is on cooldown, damaging a champion with an ability reduces Arcane Comet's remaining cooldown by 20% (10% for damage over time effects)."

Domination

The Aether Blade [D/S set bonus]
AP increased from 10 to 18
AD increased from 7 to 10.8

The Ingenious Hunter [D/I set bonus]
AP increased from 10 to 18
AD increased from 7 to 10.8

The Immortal Butcher [D/R set bonus]
AP increased from 10 to 18
AD increased from 7 to 10.8

The Glorious Executioner [D/P set bonus]
AP increased from 10 to 18
AD increased from 7 to 10.8

Inspiration

The Stargazer [I/S set bonus]
AP increased from 18 to 30
AD increased from 12.6 to 18

The Ruthless Visionary [I/D set bonus]
AP increased from 18 to 21.6
AD lowered from 16.8 to 13

The Virtuoso [I/P set bonus]
Attack speed increased from 16.8% to 2160% [Assume this is a bug!]

For a complete listing of the new Runes effects and values, have a look at our Runes Effects and Values document (including a helpful changelist to note changes from a certain date):

Miscellaneous

The Runes ward we saw testing in the 7.20 PBE cycle seems to have had some tweaks, but is bugged at the moment! Pictures will come later this cycle when it is corrected.

Balance Changes

* NOTE*: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, & experimental changes. Be aware that what you see below may be relative to other changes earlier this cycle! These are not official notes.

Champions

[** Note: Looks like a lot of base stat changes again today, but seem to just be rounding the numbers. Here is Aatrox for example. The full list will be updated on the Current PBE Cycle Coverage page later tonight!]**Aatrox

Context & Notes

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped.

We're still working on base stat and ability changes that will accompany the other pre-season changes at the moment and more of those should be back on PBE this week. One thing I figured it would be good to talk more about there though is what our goals are with those changes. In particular, we're not trying to offer every champion the same gold value of extra base stats. What we are trying to do is give each champ what they'll need to be successful post runes changes. Based off how other changes impact them champs may need more or less base stats added than others to put them around the same spot they were before. Magic damage dealers for example benefiting from MR removal from old runes effectively gain extra power that way, even if they're not directly getting extra stats. Some champs may need much more specialized adjustments, whereas others may be fine with just a bunch of armor. Some champs will also benefit more from the new runes system than others.

The adjustments that go in 7.22 will also just be round one. They're our best estimate of what's needed to begin with, the real polish and tuning will come afterwards though once we've seen where champion balance actually lands, rather than having to just work off predictions. As with every pre-season patch there'll be some champs that have a rough time for a little bit, or do really well, and we'll likely need to further adjust base stats on a number of them at that point to get things where they should be.

Ardent Censer

Looking back we definitely misread how impactful Censer would become and should have nerfed it quicker. We're talking about it a lot at present, including discussion on whether after the 7.19 changes it's still too strong. The version in 7.18 we're seeing in Worlds is definitely out of line, somewhat harder to get a good read on the 7.19 one given how much Worlds impacts what gets played in regular games/what gets talked about, even though they're different patches. At a minimum we'll be both assessing it in 7.21 and looking at it again after pre-season goes out.

Non LoL: the concept of 'piggybacking' in design

This isn't LoL specific, but mentioning it since I know some folks also have an interest in game design in general. There's a lot of good writing around that talks about various game design principles. One example of that I really like is Mark Rosewater's talk about what he calls 'piggybacking' in the blog post linked below. Piggybacking is a way of communicating a lot of complex stuff to the player quickly and easily by using their existing understanding of things. Well worth a read if that sounds interesting even if you're not familiar with Magic the Gathering which is the game Rosewater generally talks about.

We're getting a few more item specific pings in, hopefully for 7.21. Stuff like letting you ping stack numbers of Tear or whether Duskblade is currently detecting something or not (as per the icon on the buffbar already). If you've got thoughts on item specific info it'd be valuable to be able to share with your team would love to hear them."

2) Playtest Penguinwith context on some of the Lethality changes this patch:

"to TL;DR the problem with ~some~ context I have:

We did some systematic DPS testing, and squishy vs squishy damage was noticeably lower than it was on live (somewhere from 10-12% lower) and so these Void/Lethality changes are a starting point to tune them back towards their "correct" spot."

"This is on the right track, but it's not quite as 1:1 of a correlation as that. We're doing whatever tuning is necessary to keep Runes Reforged champion damage similar in the average case as compared to the live game, and trying to minimize splash damage to other systems/classes along the way. It's not just a matter of penetration - champions are also losing a number of universally-taken damage amps from the mastery system (double-edged sword et al.)."

Check out [THIS PAGE] for a comprehensive list of the new content & changes currently on the PBE as a part of this cycle or catch up with the individual update links below !